Dancing to Dirges

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

There will be trees. Something will matter.

I had a thought yesterday. I hesitate to call it an epiphany, mostly because the word is overused. Let's think of it as a little clarity.

Let me tell you about how I ended up here. I don't remember stressing over college when I was in high school. My junior year my parents and I went to a couple different campuses, shook some hands, ate some cafeteria food. But I only applied to one place, because I was only really interested in one place. In certain circles of Christian American culture, there is only one best school. Everything else is a safety school, or somewhere you go because you aren't driven to be the best. I didn't bother with safety schools.

I've often thought about what would have happened if I'd gone a different direction. You know, if I'd thought about what I wanted to do with my life in a specific and structured way, rather than just going with what people thought would work for me. I'd probably have ended up at Iowa. Iowa or New York. I can't even imagine who I'd be in that environment. I have trouble understanding how I ended up the way I am, even when I'm familiar with the path I *did* take. Anyway. That's how I got to Chicago, to this school. Part of my motivation was to meet the expectations of my community. Part was to get the hell away from that community. Tick Tock.

At college I met my wife. If I were to boil everything else away, everything has been worth it just to meet her. I don't want to dwell on the details, but it's almost silly how well we get along. When we argue it drives me nuts. When we get along it's like sunshine. Sunshine that tastes like strawberries. Something. Anyway. I met my wife. We got married the summer after my junior year. I was still in school, but she had graduated and had a full time job. Instead of renting for a year or two, we moved directly into our first house. The money came from a fund my grandmother had given me when I was born, to pay for college. My parents invested some of the money in real estate, and that went well. It paid for the down payment on our first house, some portion of the monthly payments for about a year, and my wife's wedding ring. But things were tight, let's be clear. Then things got worse.

I got expelled from school, halfway through my senior year. I was going crazy. If I could have held off the crazy for another four or five months, things would be different. Again, I don't know how, but I wouldn't be here, doing this. That's not how things are, though. I got expelled, and I needed a job that day. I took a job as a waiter, and quickly ended up as head wait and bartender. The money was okay, but god the dollars were tight. I went back to school, part time at first at the community college to work out some of the transcript issues, then full time at a better local school. The second school had an entirely different way of organizing their English program, though, so I ended up having to take the entire core curriculum in one year. That was three English classes at a time, plus a couple other courses to cover requirements that the first school didn't have. All in all it took almost three years from when I should have graduated to when I actually got a degree.

Once I was out of school I started looking for jobs. I applied at a *lot* of places, did a lot of interviews, but I only got one offer. It was a strange interview, because I had zero qualifications for the job at hand, but I emphasized my, I don't know. Fanatical will to succeed, I suppose. It was true, but that's not the kind of thing you go into a job interview touting. Point is, they offered me the job right there and then. I should have taken that as a warning sign; these people didn't know who they should be hiring. They shouldn't have hired me. In fact, looking around the building, they shouldn't have hired any of these people. Maybe that's how companies work.

This is what it comes down to. I didn't choose this place. I didn't choose Chicago, not really. I didn't intend to stay here after college, and yet next month marks my 16th year here. I didn't choose this career path, but I was desperately poor and just needed to work, that day. I've built up a lot of inertia here, and things are just barely tolerable enough that it would be too much trouble to move on. Pretty much everything I've done since college, I've thought of it as a temporary measure until I can get to where I want to be.

I've spent more than a decade living five years in the future. I keep telling myself that there's this other place ahead of me, this house in the NW with trees and good weather, and friends that I like and a job that I love and that I'm willing to work hard for. And that place doesn't exist. I'm here. I go to parties and I just get bored, the days are sunny and it depresses the fuck out of me and nothing, nothing seems to matter. Because nothing can compare to that other place, that fantasy place, that thing that lives in my head but will. never. be. And I can't adjust to that. But I'm trying.

Friday, July 20, 2007

Jolly Rogering, Union Jacking

I'm so bad at keeping up with this thing. I keep thinking "Oh, I just posted something. That'll hold people." Then I look back at it's been, like, three WEEKS. Where does time go. Ah, that's right, into the sucking blackness of lost opportunities. I forget.

I finished chapter five at work today. I'm nearly a third of the way through my plot summary. Things have slowed down, but I'm still happy with what I've got and where I'm going. The word count is on target. I don't hate it yet. That's an improvement.

I recently finished reading Thirteen by Richard K Morgan. It's called The Black Man in the UK and elsewhere. The book got a couple things going in my head. First off, I wish brits would stop writing about the US. It's clumsy. We're a little more complicated than the red state/blue state thing. Gaiman got it right in American Gods, probably in a way that an American author couldn't because we're so deeply in the culture. Other than that? I like my brits, but write about Europe or something.

The other thing that came up in my head was sex. Not unusual. I'm a fan. But I don't include sex in my writing, like, at all. And this is maybe something where the stereotyping works out, because I'm sure that it has something to do with my upbringing. I'm comfortable with violence, but not the boobies and the dicks. Hell, in chapter two of the current work the POV takes someone to task with a hammer. But sex? Not in the book. I think I'm going to work on that. That should be sufficiently embarrassing to keep me from writing ever again.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Berzerker Down

I just found out that Fred Saberhagen died on June 29. The information is a little slow filtering through the net. Bear with me as I unpack this.

Saberhagen was my first favorite author. Prior to him I had sort of grazed the science fiction shelves, picking up and reading whatever struck me as interesting. But once I clipped the Berzerker series I was hooked. I bought or borrowed everything he wrote. Some of it wasn't for me, but that was rare. He approached his characters with real humanity, and that's saying something. I'm sad I never got to meet him, but I am unimaginably grateful that I got to read him.